Brolliesgalore

Umbrellas are an essential part of day to day life and Christine and Linda Naysmith, creators of the successful site Brolliesgalore, believe that everyone should be able to choose a unique umbrella that reflects their own personality. This is why they offer such an amazing range, with over 1,000 different umbrellas to choose from, colourful to classic, plain to floral, Brolliesgalore has something for everyone. Even The Duchess of Cambridge has been spotted with one of their parasols!

Brolliesgalore moved to Actinic from another platform in October 2013. Below Christine and Linda describe the key to their success:

Key to success:

We first tried out Actinic for our other website, The Stick & Cane Shop, and were surprised at the level of service and the eagerness of the Actinic team to help us succeed. After this experience we decided to migrate our existing site Brolliesgalore to Actinic, a decision we have never regretted. The loading time is faster, and with an uptime of 99.99% we know that our site is in good hands with Actinic.

In order to properly showcase the variety of our products and really display the different styles and colours we offer, we needed a website design that would stand out and catch customers’ eye. With the help of Actinic’s design team, we were able to create an attractive and professional site.

We are working closely with Actinic’s SEO team to strategically optimise our website for search engines and improve our visibility. These organic SEO techniques combined with purchased advertising have led to more than satisfactory results: we appear on the first page of search results for main keywords and are strategically placed compared to our competitors.

We designed the homepage to showroom our services, products, highlight our blog and social media activity. Starting with a slide show of different collections and feature image links on our home page allows customers to easily see the different services and range of products we offer. We then use faceted search on our category pages to enable customers to easily search by colour, price, style or brand. Finally, on the product pages we use multiple image views and zoom images to help visitors get a really good look at our products. This reassures them, as they can look at items in great detail, as you would in a brick-and-mortar store but with the convenience of online shopping.

With the customisation that the Actinic platform allows, we were able to make our site very user-friendly and guide customers to the shopping cart, as our conversion rate can testify: 5.4%—twice as high as the average ecommerce site!

Making things easy for customers is obviously very important, and is something that Actinic understands. We were easily able to integrate several shipping options onto our site (including next-day service and international shipping) and different payment methods (credit cards, PayPal, cheque, by phone…) which all help contribute to our conversion rate. In the final steps before confirming a purchase, customers need to be reassured and have their needs catered to.

Lastly, who could forget the importance of multi-channel sales? With Actinic Marketplace Manager and SmartFeeds it’s easy: our stock is automatically synchronised and we manage everything directly from our back office. We sell Brolliesgalore products on eBay, Amazon and Google Shopping. Using multiple distribution channels gives us access to a larger customer base and helps improve our products’ visibility. 24% of our orders are made through Amazon alone, and another 5% on the mobile version of our site.”

Actinic Advantages

…that helped us succeed

Thanks to the help of the Actinic design team, our website is inviting and professional and attracts customers while remaining straightforward and user-friendly.

Organically search-engine optimised content in conjunction with paid campaigns focusing on strategic keywords have allowed us to set ourselves apart from our competitors and conquer our place in the marketplace.

Actinic’s easy-to-use and customisable ecommerce platform allows us to easily change or update the homepage and brochure pages so that our website can develop and grow along with our business.

Actinic’s innovative features give us the advantages we need to succeed and increase our sales. With the Marketplace Manager, for example, exporting our products to eBay and Amazon and synchronising inventory is made simple, and we manage our sales right from the Actinic back office.”